We arrive in Kiteni, a ramshackle boomtown along the pipeline route, after a 16-hour odyssey from Cuzco on a cramped, teetering bus. We step off the bus into total darkness and the crush of a crowd. Occasional headlights reveal thousands of people wandering the town's main street, milling about in small circles, lounging in doorways. Small candles burn where makeshift restaurants have been set up on the roadside. A cluster of people gathers around a small television connected to a generator in the main plaza. Kiteni is the last stop on Peru's electricity grid, and lights here are spotty at best.

A child plays in the muddy streets of Kiteni.

Ever since Techint, the largest stakeholder in the TGP consortium, established its headquarters here two years ago, workers from every corner of Peru have poured into Kiteni with the hope of getting a job. The sleepy mountain village, which used to have just one small hotel and a population of 600, has swollen into a small city of 10,000, its 16 hotels unable to shelter all the men flooding in.

Over dinner that night, we talk with our guide, Walter Kategari. Kategari is among the few Machiguenga who have earned an advanced degree. He's vice president of the tribe's political federation and proves to be a good source for history of the region. The town's Machiguenga name is Kiteriari, which means blood-colored river, he tells us. It was named after a turn-of-the-century battle between the Yine and Machiguenga Indians that turned the river red. The Machiguenga used to dominate this region, but today Kiteni is a colono town, full of the settlers that have repopulated most of the Upper Urubamba River Valley, pressing native communities deeper into the jungles to the east.

The restaurant's amber lights flicker momentarily as the town switches to a backup generator. Two young women in skimpy clothes wander into the restaurant, their eyes on us gringos. The owner waves them away. "Girls come [to Kiteni] for work just like the men do," Kategari says. "In order to survive, people do this."

The next morning, Kiteni's mayor, Francisco Alvarez Camargo, offers to help us find a car to take us on to Shimaa, the first Machiguenga community on our route southeast into the Camisea. "Someday they'll call this the Golden Age," Alvarez says as he walks us through puddles in Kiteni's mud streets, slowly moving past half-built cinderblock buildings and huddled groups of men cowering in the rain.

Next stop: Shimaa. Felch and Raphael's driver stands with his 1973 Corolla. Although Shimaa was just a few miles from Kiteni, the journey took several hours. The road took a huge chunk out of the Corolla's trunk, in a spot right above the wheel.

Outsiders Pour Into Villages in a Desperate Search for Jobs

We stop to talk with one of the hundreds of slack-faced men standing in doorways and under awnings, waiting for the rains to stop. "It's the only big project in the country offering jobs," says Anderson, an intense 31-year-old. Anderson is wearing dirty clothes and sports a scraggly beard. He says he traveled to Kiteni from his home in Arequipa 45 days ago and still hasn't gotten work. He ran out of money a week ago and had to sleep on a friend's floor and borrow money for food.

Anderson stays on in Kiteni, he says, because he has so few other choices. Last year he worked here as a carpenter. The $350 per month he made for seven straight months, he tells us, got him and his family through the rest of the year. "We went back to our communities and told everyone, and now they've come too," Anderson continues. "From Lima, Junin, Piura, Cajamarca, Arequipa. All over the country."

In addition to other hardships, he mentions the rising tension between residents of the town, the new workers pouring in and company officials. A strike last fall exacerbated tensions, Anderson adds. "The companies are bringing in foreigners because they know they won't strike."

Francisco Castaneda Lopez, head of the Urubamba Farmworker's Federation, argues that these new jobs should go neither to foreigners nor to out-of-towners like Anderson, but rather to locals like the farmers he represents. The price of a bushel of coffee slid from $114 to $20 in the last few years, Castaneda says. Farmers can barely survive on the 50 bushels of coffee they harvest in a good year. They can make the equivalent of 450 bushels a year working for the oil companies, according to Castaneda.

As happens in most boomtowns, the current boom may swiftly turn to bust. Techint is expected to complete the pipeline in a year, and when it does, the jobs will disappear. "We've advanced 20 years in the last three years," Mayor Alvarez says. "But soon the workers will go home, and the farmers will go back to their plots. In a year, all this will be gone."

The next morning the mayor's personal chauffeur picks us up in his rusted-out 1973 Toyota Corolla. He's taking us to Shimaa, a Machiguenga community a few hours down the road. The jobless men in Kiteni watch as we slowly roll out of town, the Corolla's tires lurching in the mud.

NEXT: Shimaa - Landslides and Confrontations

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